I assume you have a clear enough visual memory of Michaelangelo’s most famous Pietà and of the Roman sculpture, “The Dying Gaul.”
Before the you read the sonnet below, please look again at the famous carving of Akhenaten and Nefertiti and the famous bas relief sculpture of the Lapith and the Centaur from the parthenon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intaglio_(sculpture)#Sunken_relief
Your reception of the poem might be further improved if you also look at a photo of the sculpture of Athena mourning from the Parthenon’s entablature:
Relief
The shadows make it. Akhenaten shown
With Nefertiti is revealed below
The surface of the coldly warm sandstone.
The great god sun disk sheds his spoke-like glow
Defined by darkness. Marble bas relief
Reveals Athena in the slightest tilt,
Half raised above the marble, coolest grief
Imaginable. Goddesses and guilt
Don’t really blend. It’s not until we see
The lapith and the centaur in their high
Carved agony of life and mortality
That headless scupture can begin to cry.
We call, “Spare us hard carvings that appall,
The harsh light Pietà, the Dying Gaul.